Strange problem with Partition Magic 8

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george41407

Strange problem with Partition Magic version 8.

This might not be the newsgroup to ask this, but I'm not sure where
else....

I just got a whole box of smaller hard drives (10 to 20 gigs). They
were all blank with no partitions. FDISK showed no partition info.
One by one I plugged them in and ran Partition Magic. Then I
partitioned and formatted them. All went well, and all of them are
good.

When I plugged in the last one, a Quantum 15gig, Partition Magic gave
me a "read error", and would not load. Thinking I just had a
misloading of Windows (I run Win98SE), I rebooted. Same problem. I
ran the installer for Partition Magic and used the "repair PM"
function. Once again I rebooted and got the same error. I shut down
and unplugged this harddrive. I reloaded Windows and Partition Magic
worked fine. I shut down and plugged that drive back in. Once again,
Partition Magic gave me that error message and would not load.
Unplugging the drive allowed P.M to load once again......

WTF ?????

OK, I decided to partition that drive the old fashioned way and see if
that would work. I booted directly to DOS and ran FDISK to make the
partitions. Then I formatted that partition using the DOS FORMAT
command. The drive checked out fine, and SCANDISK (from Dos) showed
no errors.

I rebooted again, and loaded Windows. This time Partition Magic
worked just fine. (With that drive hooked up).

Note, this drive was plugged into the secondary IDE port. (as drive
3).

Why the heck would P.M. not work? After all, it's main purpose is to
partition and format blank drives, which this was. Like I said, none
of the other drives caused any problems when I plugged them in without
any partitions. All I can guess is that this drive had been used with
some oddball non-compatible system, such as a Macintosh, or Linux, or
something else not compatible with Windows/Dos.
But since the drive had no partitions on it, why would any former use
have any effect at all. and why did manual partitioning and formatting
fix the problem.

I just started to use P.M recently, so I am not all that familiar with
it, but this is not anything I could do anything about, since P.M
would not load as long as that blank drive was hooked to the cable.
I just took a guess and decided to partition and format it manually so
I could see if the drive would accept the partitions and formatting.

I cant seem to find anything in the P.M help files about this. I am
wondering if this could be a software error, but why would only that
one drive cause it. I have sufficient memory too, with it being 320
megs of ram or something like that.

Anyone have any ideas?


George
 
In said:
Why the heck would P.M. not work?
Click to expand...

Because it saw a partition already out there with errors on it.
FDISK is a lot more forgiving about this; just reporting that a
partition exists that it doesn't recognize the format for. But FDISK
allows you to delete the existing partition (not caring what format it
is or how bad) and then create new ones.

Partition Magic, on the other hand, tries to protect you from
accidentally deleting a special partition.

Somewhat like Windows these days won't reformat a bad floppy, while old
DOS programs will. (No, not even in a DOS box. You have to BOOT from a
DOS floppy.) Once reformatted though from DOS, Windows will read the
fixed floppy just fine. ;-{
 
Because it saw a partition already out there with errors on it.
FDISK is a lot more forgiving about this; just reporting that a
partition exists that it doesn't recognize the format for. But FDISK
allows you to delete the existing partition (not caring what format it
is or how bad) and then create new ones.

Partition Magic, on the other hand, tries to protect you from
accidentally deleting a special partition.

Somewhat like Windows these days won't reformat a bad floppy, while old
DOS programs will. (No, not even in a DOS box. You have to BOOT from a
DOS floppy.) Once reformatted though from DOS, Windows will read the
fixed floppy just fine. ;-{
Click to expand...

Yea, but the drive was wiped clean, meaning NO partitions existed.
All I can figure is it was wiped with a Macintosh or something
unusual.

I got these drives from a computer recycler. All drives must be wiped
clean before they sell them. I have a friend that works there who got
these drives for me. They sell any that work but lately they have had
a surplus of the smaller ones (20 gig and under), and she said they
were doing a special. Not only did they drop the price but they were
doing a buy one get one free deal. I told her to get me 6 of them,
but I ended up getting 7 because one had gotten some bent pins for the
ribbon cable, and she said that one would have gone gone into the
recycle box, and thus she tossed it in for free. My needlenose plyers
took care of that easy enough. It wasn't that one that caused the
problem either. I always thought that no partitions meant the
computer saw nothing but the drive's circuit board.

Maybe I need to install the Dos version of Partition Magic. It comes
with the installation but I choose not to install it. I will now. I
wish I had tried it on this drive before I fixed the problem.

I plan to ask her what software they use to wipe these drives. My
guess would be to just use fdisk and remove the partitions, but who
knows.

George
 
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